Yesterday I was halfway trying to upgrade to v0.20.0 when Steem-related services grinded to a halt. That was the beginning of my first emergency experience being a Steem witness. To be honest, it wasn't quite a smooth and intuitive process for me at first. Going through the learning curve I guess. Now I know a little more about the codebase as well.

AFAIK, the problem is with the incompatible post lockout period between v0.19.x and v0.20.0 that forked the chain up, loosely speaking. Good thing there are reliable witnesses to hold the fort, although following the mantra of "don't trust, verify", it certainly took me awhile to make sure it wasn't all a coordinated attack. Maybe I was thinking too much.

_{Basically what happened. Source}

Here's what I did to remedy my situation, in case anyone's interested:-

• Duplicated the existing blocklog into a reserve and replaced the existing one with a new download.
• Opened config.ini, searched for checkpoint and inserted the block and hash of interest: _{checkpoint = [26037575, "018d4d47225e6cada82b9aaabc8503ee318c547c"]}
• git apply these patches on Steem's repo after verifying them the best I can:

_{a. https://github.com/abitmore/steem/commit/91d9ca782ef0de87015f2d3d14bea4571aa98811.patch
b. https://github.com/abitmore/steem/commit/250e9b96be7080c35220e948e84a9b4b2d255b71.patch
c. https://github.com/abitmore/steem/commit/2e7dca8e9639df6a62429f58a24803978bbc5b7b.patch
d. https://github.com/abitmore/steem/commit/9ef9052e00ddf61dbff6d2a3f1e1a839d3db190e.patch}

• Rebuilt v0.19.12.
• Replayed the chain.
• Watched this super duper interesting video while waiting (Source: aoflex):-
  

Chilled out with some music (Source: Ninotchka):-

Took a power nap.

Signed the pubkey.

Now I'm back up running v0.19.12 and looks like it had its first meal of the day a couple of hours ago. Seems alright for the time being.

Let me know if I did anything wrong or if I could do anything better. Looking forward to learning the best practices and preparations. Kudos to the witnesses who are helping out with the situation.

So when HF20?

Note: By the way, there's a scam / phishing attempt going on the network, read @arcange's post on it: https://steemit.com/steemit/@arcange/phishing-attempts-are-running-and-use-fake-comments-with-images.

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_{Follow me @kevinwong}